


On Rogue Telepath Allegations - A Response (Part 1)

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [85]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Episode: s02e07 A Race Through Dark Places, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, How canon misled you, Internal Corps Politics, Politics, Psi Corps, Rogue Telepaths, Sacrifice, Telepath culture, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 09:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12861987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: InA Race Through Dark Places, a rogue telepath alleges that the Corps killed his brother for speaking out against them.True or false?The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!





	On Rogue Telepath Allegations - A Response (Part 1)

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

_Please note that a discussion of the second allegation requires more background information than I have yet established in this project, and so that will be covered later.  
_

In _A Race Through Dark Places_ , Talia has been kidnapped by rogue telepaths. One of them has the following dialogue with her:

Rogue telepath: "--and I guess that's how they found my brother before they found me. They said he could either join the Corps, go into a relocation camp, or take the sleepers, so he wouldn't accidentally violate the privacy of normals. Well, he took the sleepers. It shut off his talent, but it didn't stop him from speaking out against the Corps. He wrote the Senate, the media, got interviewed by ISN, till one day when they came to give him his injection. He closed his eyes and never woke up."

Talia: "The Corps doesn't murder its own."

Rogue telepath: "I was there. All you need to do is scan me to see for yourself."

True or false?

**Partially true, partially false.  
**

In my [earlier essay on this episode](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12827937), I discussed the sneaky tactic of manipulating images by cropping them such as to give viewers a different, even opposite, impression. See, for instance, the [bottom image here](http://famepace.com/13-creative-photo-cropping-hides-truth-social-media-posts/), which I would include if I were teaching a course in How Propaganda Works. It's not that the images on the left or on the right are "false" - they are part of the image, but if you look at the whole image, you see what's going on is something other than what you initially thought. (So a propagandist will never include the context.)

The incident that this rogue telepath described above, taken exactly as written, did happen, to that one person. But the show's message isn't that this one thing happened, but that this is part of a systemic policy, a pattern, a "truth" about the Corps that once revealed to Talia, causes her to instantly abandon her family, friends, community, culture, and _entire upbringing_ just because she heard two allegations - from people who had kidnapped her.

Even [Stockholm Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome) takes longer than a few hours to set in, you know.

(And Talia is presented not as having developed Stockholm Syndrome as a result of her captivity, but to have "seen the light!" and realized that all along, the bigots who hate her culture, community and family "were right all along"! Her people are monsters! She really was a victim of them, all along! She needs mundanes to save her! She needs to immediately go apologize to a [violent bigot](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10507632) who has been slandering her people and community all along in this show, even threatening a telepath with violence for just... being there ( _Eyes_ ), and naturally as part of the apology she must remove symbols of her people that "offend" this bigot (everything is always about the comfort of mundanes, after all) - all so the two of them can develop a Romantic Relationship! ...And this reminds me of the start of a very fucked up and teep-exploiting porn movie, written, produced and consumed by mundanes. Puke.)

But back to the allegation itself, let's break it apart.

  * "They said he could either join the Corps, go into a relocation camp, or take the sleepers, so he wouldn't accidentally violate the privacy of normals."



**True, but not because this is sadistic Corps policy - this is literally Earth Alliance law.**

The show, here as in _Legacies_ , presents this choice as somehow the Corps being abusive of telepaths, when as I've said many times before, none of this is the choice of telepaths at all. A hundred and fifty years before this time period, the Earth Alliance established this policy, and it expanded all across Earth and human-colonized space in the next fifty years. By 2156 - a century before this episode - it was universal.

In case you missed this, I discuss it extensively in the history lesson [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10292036) and elsewhere. Normals took away all rights telepaths had, and let's be honest:

There is NO CHANCE AT ALL that Talia doesn't know this history. Everyone knows it, both telepaths and normals. Canon admits that everyone knows it. EVEN GARIBALDI KNOWS IT.

(Also, to quibble, he wouldn't say "so he wouldn't accidentally violate the privacy of normals," because only people who have been raised to see the natural functioning of their minds as [akin to sexual assault](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10491045) or otherwise a violation of others' "rights" would ever even think in such terms! For a telepath, he's talking like a  _very_ ignorant mundane. It also makes it look like the purpose of joining the Corps is so that telepaths can no longer sense things around them, which makes zero sense - since when does marking themselves in public actually prevent telepaths from passively ("accidentally") being able to see what others are thinking and feeling around them? Of course not - the law requires telepaths to be registered and marked because Earth has created a caste system, and intrinsic to having a caste system of any kind is knowing who is in what caste. Again, everyone: [A Mini History Lesson](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10292036). The stages of genocide. Learn them.)

  *  "Well, he took the sleepers. It shut off his talent, but it didn't stop him from speaking out against the Corps. He wrote the Senate, the media, got interviewed by ISN, till one day when they came to give him his injection. He closed his eyes and never woke up."



**True, but again, misleading - though this incident did happen, the background has not been explained, and it was an isolated incident and not part of some sadistic Corps policy to kill its own for dissent.**

Imagine there was a country that had laws and policies on the books against torture. And in just about every possible case, they didn't torture. And then one time, there was this one incident, where a terrorist was captured and if authorities didn't find out from him right then and there where the bomb was, thousands would die. And there was no other way, so in that one case, they tortured him, found out where the bomb was, diffused it, and saved thousands of lives.

And now imagine that someone got hold of the tape of that incident and went public with it, alleging that it proves this country has a policy of torture, that it regularly tortures, and that that WHOLE COUNTRY is therefore fundamentally evil and should be destroyed.

Would this be honest? Of course not. Talia is absolutely right when she says that "the Corps doesn't murder its own." And if she'd scanned him as he offered, maybe she would have learned more of the context behind this incident.

  * First, the implication that the Corps systematically kills people for dissenting is literally contradicted by the rogue's account itself. He says that after going on sleepers, his brother made a very public, very sustained, very loud campaign of dissent. He wrote to senators. He was interviewed on the news. He went on ISN. _He was a well-known trouble-maker_ , both to normals and to the Corps. He'd been at it for years. And what did the Corps do to him in all that time? **NOTHING AT ALL.** (Do you think you could get away with the merest fraction of dissent like that in an actually oppressive regime, like North Korea? Stalinist Russia? For four minutes, let alone four years?)


  * What changed? Well, _A Race Through Dark Places_ took place two months after the [charter violation of January 2259](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12852477). Go read that post. That was January. This is March.


  * In light of the mass media hysteria about the Corps' charter violation, and paranoid conspiracy theories that the Corps had assassinated Santiago, the mundane media couldn't book this guy for a news slot fast enough. They gave him a slot not just on local or national or Earth news, but INTERSTELLAR news, so his message could reach all those [teep-hating bigots out on distant colonies](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12827937) where the Corps can't effectively protect their telepath population. And he happily got on there and told everyone that the Corps should be abolished, that the Corps is evil, that maybe the Corps did assassinate Santiago.


  * And then just maybe, as happens every time a negative story about the Corps hits the media, the **Corps got reports of telepaths being assaulted and killed all over Earth Alliance space** , just because they were there, they were in the Corps, and therefore must be somehow "in on it" or "responsible for it" or "deserving of punishment for it." (Like how European and other Diaspora Jews get assaulted because of events in the Middle East.)



(This is the reality behind why the Corps represses negative news stories - if they don't, telepaths die. They also suppress news reports of incidents that EarthGov might interpret as charter violations, like the incident regarding telepath participation in a work shutdown on Io, a report of which nevertheless made it to press (Deadly Relations. p. 196). A charter violation could lead to severe, even deadly repercussions from the Senate: sanctions on the Corps (a reduction of vital services), or even, if it was bad enough, abolishment of the Corps as a whole. (That wouldn't happen because of one incident on Io, but there could be sanctions, yes.))

And Talia would have to be living under a rock not to know about what happened back on Earth with the charter violation. She would know how that puts her and everyone else in terrible danger. I know she's isolated up in space, but if Sheridan and Garibaldi caught this "big news," she obviously did, too.

Now, it's true that telepaths do not have the same political free speech rights as normals do. **That's in the Psi Corps charter.** Remember that line, "We took away every right they had and shoved them in a black box called Psi Corps"? Normals did it, and nothing changed. The charter hasn't changed in a hundred years. Normals curtailed those rights to control telepaths, and they condition telepaths' **very lives** on them (telepaths) not involving themselves in normal politics. If you want to point to an oppressive regime that curtails free political speech, _it's the Earth Alliance._ (And though telepaths are permitted to vote, their vote is one in a thousand, spread out all over the planet, so it has no real effect. Many don't even vote.)

This "political neutrality" condition, and its wide-reaching implications, is part of why telepaths everywhere - both those who prefer their own planet and those who prefer the Corps to become its own, separate, sovereign government on Earth - ultimately dream of sovereignty. Everyone knows that normals getting to decide what telepaths are and are not allowed to say, politically, is bullshit.

But it's the sad reality.

**The truth is that the Corps does not kill its own people (or telepaths on sleepers, or rogue telepaths), other than in extreme cases, most of which involve those people behaving in ways that create an immediate, clear and present danger to the lives of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of others.**

This guy was doing exactly that. Was the killing legal? Probably not, because he wasn't technically in the Corps, so they don't have legal jurisdiction over him in the same way (if they did, the mundane director could have legally ordered his death, no questions asked). It was probably also ordered by someone other than the director, a lower level person who understood the danger this man was posing, and saw there wasn't any other good option. So like the hypothetical discussed above (about torture), it was illegal, but it was necessary, and it saved lives. **The Corps wasn't abolished in Season 2.**

And in case readers here missed it, the Corps didn't kill Ivanova's mother, either. ([Here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10219790) and [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10293074/chapters/22772363).) Mundanes did. They made the laws, and they made the drugs, and they made the drugs to kill.

So yes, there are curtailments of political speech. Yes, mundanes have curtailed those rights. But are telepaths (in the Corps or on sleepers) killed for criticizing the Corps? **No.** (And this guy went well beyond "criticism.") **  
**

Who does kill telepaths? Well, the mundane director can kill any telepath he wants, for any reason at all, because the Senate has given him that power. [Vacit could order a rogue telepath killed because he needed an excuse to go to Venus and talk to Vorlons.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10293074/chapters/22772363) Johnston could kill most of the telepath leadership of the Corps when he came into power - including Natasha Alexander, Sandoval Bey, and just about everyone Bester grew up with in Cadre Prime.

That's who really kills telepaths in the Corps - the mundanes at the top. For disloyalty. For "disloyalty." For being inconvenient. For no reason at all.

In contrast, the Corps goes to extreme lengths **not** to kill other telepaths, even rogues. Psi Cops and bloodhounds intentionally held their fire in the Dexter raid, even as they were fired upon with deadly force - and many died - because they did not want to kill their own. **Because family does not kill family** \- even when those rogues have violated every moral and legal principle, even when they kill, maim, and bomb others, both telepaths and normals. As Bey tells adolescent Bester in Deadly Relations, on p. 88:

"You love the Corps, but that isn't enough. You must love those _in_ the Corps, and they must love you. You must love the Blips you hunt."

But being practical people, there are limits, as there have to be. If someone runs into a shopping center shooting wildly in all directions, not caring who is hurt or killed, do you think police are not going to stop the threat, even if that means that the shooter might be killed? Of course they have to protect their own people. That's what it means to be a police officer who serves and protects.

I'm going to close this out with one more story. Do you remember the school play in [Andy's third story](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10610514/chapters/23463243)? I didn't drop that in there because I just made up some random tale. That story illustrates an important point about telepath culture, one that is especially relevant right here. The "selfish spider" put his own interests over the literal life and death of the others in his family and community. It was all about him. He divorced himself from his community (as did the telepath here who chose to take sleepers, and then to go around and publicly slander his people).

The selfish spider continued to behave selfishly, even as outsiders (e.g. normals, the old man and old woman in the story) discriminated against him, and threatened him. He thought like a mundane - that it was all about him, and that he had some "right" to make it all about him, no matter what happened to anyone else as a consequence of his behavior. (The telepath's brother in  _A Race Through Dark Places_ , like [Josephine](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10293074/chapters/22772363), believed that by going on sleepers, he would continue to be able to cash in on mundane privilege, and that he was _entitled to it_. Josephine, of course, never endangered anyone else, and she quickly learned the truth.) This rogue telepath's brother got up there on interstellar media like he was hot shit, with mundanes fawning over him and kissing his ass like they do over anyone who bashes the Corps - and like that hypothetical guy shooting up a supermarket, didn't care who on Earth or in the colonies might be hurt by his actions.

And the Corps doesn't tolerate that bullshit. Usually the consequences are more along the lines of "being shamed/being shunned from society," at least temporarily (or for a telepath on sleepers... no consequences at all), but here, it was more extreme because people were getting hurt, and the director had just committed the most flagrant charter violation possible. Everyone was in a panic.

The reality is that in the Corps, internal dissent is tolerated (by other telepaths... I can't speak for the mundane director), especially if it remains internal and doesn't bring public shame to the family. (As I've said before, the Corps is very Asian in its culture, in some ways. [Family honor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_honor) is a very big deal, more important than an individual's desires - Sandoval Bey, former chief of MetaPol and Bester's mentor, commits suicide after being falsely accused of treason by the director, in order to spare the Corps the shame of a public scandal.) There are consequences for public speech deemed too political, but those restrictions come from normals, and when telepaths try to silence each other, it's as a consequence of the larger rules under which all telepaths are forced to live (and the penalties all will face unless that speech ceases). Public speech that shames the Corps has consequences, but, under ordinary circumstances, not _lethal_ consequences. Lethal force is only used in the most extreme cases - e.g. here, where his speech was potentially endangering millions (and someone panicked). Ironheart was also potentially facing that outcome if he could not be successfully captured (Plan A, greatly preferable) - his powers were getting so out of control, he could have accidentally ripped apart a station with 250,000 humans and aliens on it.

No - better he should die than 250,000 humans and aliens should die. (And he'd put all those lives at risk by killing someone and fleeing to the station in the first place!)

Sacrifice - some must be sacrificed if all are to be saved.

This is how it is - and any time the show appears to tell you otherwise (like here, in this episode, someone in the Corps was planning to kill Talia, for added dramatic effect?), they're lying.


End file.
